Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  That is the trouble with geopolitical realism in foreign policy, especially when it is practiced with disdain for domestic constraints. You begin with a reasonable-sounding worldliness, of the kind articulated by Metternich and quoted admiringly by Henry Kissinger: “Little given to abstract ideas, we accept things as they are and we attempt to the maximum of our ability to protect ourselves against delusions about realities.” 21 You then find yourself allying with disreputable foreign rulers on the “realist” grounds that they are the people with whom you have to do business, forgetting that in so doing you have deprived yourself of any political leverage over them, because the one thing that matters most to them—how they get and keep power over their subjects—is of no interest to you. And at the last, you are thus reduced to cynicism about the outcomes not just of their actions but of your own.

  Thus, William Bundy points out, some of the most vaunted achievements of “realist” foreign policy turn out to be bogus. Kissinger and Nixon could hardly have been unaware, he concludes, that the Paris settlement of 1973 that “ended” the Vietnam War was a mirage, its clauses and safeguards “toothless.” It looked only to short-term political advantage, with no vision or strategy for handling the longer-term fallout. Their unstinting support for the Shah of Iran was similarly disastrous—first joining with him in misleading promises to the Kurds in order to bring pressure on Iran’s western neighbor, Iraq, then abandoning those same Kurds to a bloody fate, and finally bonding the image and power of the U.S. to an increasingly indefensible regime in Tehran. Like so much else about the foreign dealings of the Nixon era, the bill fell due a little later: in 1975 in Vietnam and Cambodia, in 1979-80 in Iran. And in each case the interests of the United States were among the first victims.

  This history is important, because Kissinger has always claimed that—in contrast to administrations before and since—the governments in which he served were not bemused by “idealist” mirages and kept firmly in view the chief objective of foreign policy: the pursuit and defense of the U.S. national interest. One can debate endlessly what U.S. international “interests” really are and how they are best served. But what is clear, and this was Gladstone’s point as it is Bundy’s, is that in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined in and protected by agreed procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.

  Richard Nixon was in one respect a fortunate man. Felled by Watergate, he has been resurrected in some quarters as an unlikely tragic hero—the greatest foreign policy president we (nearly) had, as it were; a man whose human flaws undermined his unrealized talents in this crucial arena of presidential action. Henry Kissinger has benefited twice over from this strange beatification—the flaws are Nixon’s, but the foreign policy was Kissinger’s, and its failures were attributable to Nixon’s domestic imbroglios. Anyone tempted to give credit to such claims should read William Bundy’s book, which anticipates what one must hope will be the considered judgment of history upon a troubled and troubling era in American public affairs.

  Following this review of William Bundy’s study of U.S. foreign policy in the Nixon years, published in the New York Review of Books in August 1998, Henry Kissinger penned a spirited and lengthy rebuttal to Bundy’s narrative and my account of it. Kissinger’s letter, along with my reply, appeared in the New York Review of Books, vol .45, no. xiv, September 1998.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER XX

  1 Mansfield is quoted from a conversation with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. See Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence (New York: Times Books, 1995), 137. It is perhaps also germane to add that Bundy is the son-in-law of the late Dean Acheson, that his father, Harvey Bundy, was a close adviser of Henry M. Stimson during World War II, and that his brother McGeorge was President Kennedy’s national security adviser, all of which makes him a member of the innermost foreign policy elite as much by dynastic relations as by election.

  2 Bundy is for the most part ostentatiously polite in expressing his distaste for the way in which the Nixon administration went about its business, confining his strictures to the content of its actions. Only very occasionally does he let slip a note of undisguised distaste. When the last set of tapes was released, on April 30, 1974, he comments almost as an aside that “the mind-set of the White House was revealed as that of the gutter.”

  3 For “putting the boot in State” see U. Alexis Johnson, The Right Hand of Power (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984), 520, quoted by Michael Schaller in Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 211; for “the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment” see William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 145.

  4 See Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 207, 209.

  5 This is one possible source of Nixon’s astonishing promise to Thieu that rather than let South Vietnam fall following the 1973 Peace Agreement he would resume bombing of the North— a promise he was in no position either to make or to keep, thus illustrating two of Bundy’s main themes. But it is just as likely that Nixon was paying off a debt incurred in 1968, when Thieu’s refusal—at Nixon’s secret urging—to negotiate with the North helped doom Hubert Humphrey in the election of that year.

  6 In view of the admiration of both Kissinger and Nixon for Charles de Gaulle, it is curious how little they learned from the French experience—in Indochina and again in Algeria. The French track record was far from admirable, but by 1969 they had learned enough to stay clear of Southeast Asia—”Get out now,” as de Gaulle advised Nixon; and after a long history of failed attempts to govern Cambodia they might have been able to advise the U.S. against risking that country’s fragile neutrality for the sake of a temporary interruption of a North Vietnamese supply route.

  7 See Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Touchstone, 1978, 1990), 527, quoted by Bundy (with emphasis added) on p. 290.

  8 Kissinger’s remark is quoted by Bundy on p. 272, citing Christopher Van Hollen, “The Tilt Policy Revisited: Nixon-Kissinger Geopolitics and South Asia,” Asian Survey 20, no. 4 (April 1980): 339-361.

  9 Arbatov, the onetime ranking Soviet expert on U.S. affairs, is quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 422-423, and by Bundy on p. 321, citing Isaacson.

  10 Bundy’s discussion of Willy Brandt’s achievements is the occasion for the only mistake of fact that I came across in his book: The ghetto memorial in Warsaw where Brandt dropped to his knees in atonement marks the site of the desperate Jewish struggle of 1943, which Bundy confuses with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when Soviet troops halted on the far side of the Vistula and waited for the Germans to destroy the Polish resistance.

  11 See Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 729, quoted by Bundy on p. 415; Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics (New York: Viking, 1992), 178.

  12 For the latest voyages into the inner recesses of the Soul of Nixon, see, e.g., Stanley I. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), and Vamik D. Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz, and Andrew W. Dod, Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

  13 See Schaller, Altered States, 211; Brandt, My Life in Politics, 365.

  14 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 105.

  15 Kissinger’s interpretation of the Congress of Vienna, and of Metternich’s contribution to the transformation of the European state system, is understandably dated—A World Restored was published in 1957. More recent scholarship questions the very notion that what took place in 1815 was the “restoration” of anything; a revolutionary transformation in international politics is how the era is de
scribed in Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848 (Oxford, New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1994); see pp. 575-582.

  16 See Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, 166, 805, 811.

  17 Metternich is quoted by Harold Nicolson in The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity 1812-1822 (London: Constable, 1946), 277.

  18 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 84-85.

  19 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 808.

  20 See R. W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (New York: Norton, 1972; first published in London, 1935), 548-549, 566. Henry Kissinger interprets the affair rather differently. In his version, the moralizing Gladstone, a “Wilsonian” idealist, undercut Britain’s standing and influence in international affairs. See 161-163.

  21 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 86.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Whose Story Is It? The Cold War in Retrospect

  At first glance John Lewis Gaddis is the ideal person to write a general history of the cold war: He has already written six books on the same subject. His new book20 is based on a popular undergraduate course at Yale, where Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History. To be sure, it is not clear in what precise respect this latest version is distinctively new—We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997) had a decidedly stronger claim.1 But Gaddis, the “dean of cold war historians” according to the New York Times, writes with consummate self-assurance. And with so much practice he has his story down pat.

  The cold war, in Gaddis’s account, was both inevitable and necessary. The Soviet empire and its allies could not be rolled back, but they had to be contained. The resulting standoff lasted forty years. A lot of time and money was spent on nuclear weapons and the cautious new strategic thinking to which they gave rise. Partly for this reason, there were no major wars (though there were a number of nerve-wracking confrontations). In the end—thanks to greater resources, a vastly more attractive political and economic model, and the initiative of a few good men (and one good woman)—the right side won. Since then, new complications have arisen, but we can at least be grateful to have said goodbye to all that.

  Gaddis is most comfortable when discussing grand strategy, and the best parts of his new book are those that deal with the impact of the nuclear arms race on American policymakers. He discusses at length, and with some sympathy, Washington’s decades-long preoccupation with “credibility”: how to convince the Soviets that we would indeed be willing to go to war over various parts of Europe and Asia while insisting with as much conviction as possible upon our reluctance to do so. If the cold war “worked” as a system for keeping the peace it was because—albeit for slightly different reasons—Moscow had parallel preoccupations. These tense but stable arrangements, based on the apposite acronym “MAD” (mutually assured destruction), only came near to breaking down when one side temporarily lost faith in its antagonist’s commitment to the system: over Cuba in 1962, when Khrushchev miscalculated and Kennedy initially misread his intentions; and in the early eighties, when Ronald Reagan’s huge rearmament program and reiterated rhetorical challenges to the “Evil Empire” led Moscow to believe that the U.S. really was planning a preemptive nuclear first strike, and to prepare accordingly.2

  Any history of the cold war that pays sustained attention to such issues of high strategy is likely to have its gaze firmly fixed upon the Great Powers. So it is with Gaddis. However, his close familiarity with the history of American foreign policy is not matched by a comparable expertise in the sources and psychology of Soviet strategic calculation. Gaddis’s account of American statesmen and their doings is detailed and lively. His coverage of Soviet behavior, by contrast, is conventional and two-dimensional. What emerges is a history of the cold war narrated as a superpower confrontation, but largely from the perspective of just one of those powers.

  Until the fall of the Soviet Union, such unbalanced accounts were the norm. Little reliable information was available about Soviet thinking. Political observers were thus reduced either to “Kremlinology”—scouring speeches, newspaper editorials, and podium lineups—or else to deducing Communist behavior from Marxist principles. But as Gaddis himself has demonstrated elsewhere, we now know quite a lot about the thinking behind Soviet policies—rather more, in fact, than we do about some Western undertakings, thanks to the opening of Communist archives. So if The Cold War: A New History is so heavily weighted toward an American perspective, this cannot be an effect of unbalanced sources.3

  It turns out to be the product of a decidedly partial viewpoint. Gaddis is an unapologetic triumphalist. America won the cold war because Americans deserved to win it. Unlike the Russians, they were “impatient with hierarchy, at ease with flexibility, and profoundly distrustful of the notion that theory should determine practice rather than the other way around.” As the cold war got under way, only America understood what “justice” meant:

  For the Americans, that term meant political democracy, market capitalism, and—in principle if not always in practice—respect for the rights of individuals. For the British and French, still running colonial empires, it meant something short of that. . . . And for Stalin’s Soviet Union, “justice” meant the unquestioning acceptance of authoritarian politics, command economies, and the right of the proletariat to advance, by whatever means the dictatorship that guided it chose to employ, toward a worldwide “classless” society.

  Even Gaddis is constrained to concede that in their pursuit of justice American statesmen occasionally resorted to shady dealings and tactics. But he insists that whereas politicians elsewhere (in China, in the Soviet Union, in Western Europe) might be congenital sinners and cynics, for Americans this was something new—a by-product of the cold war itself. American statesmen were forced to import the moral ambiguities of foreign conflicts into which they were being drawn:

  And so the Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians. Confronted with “so many who are not good,” they resolved “to learn to be able not to be good” themselves, and to use this skill or not use it, as the great Italian cynic—or patriot—had put it, “according to necessity.”

  No doubt intended to flatter Truman and his colleagues, this irenic account of the loss of American innocence has the reverse effect. It bathes U.S. history before the cold war in a sort of prelapsarian glow, while implausibly portraying worldly, cosmopolitan diplomats like Harriman, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and others as a generation of benign provincial gentlemen reluctantly obliged to compromise their ethics and adopt the sophisticated, worldly wiles of their foes in order to overcome them.

  Appropriately enough, Gaddis’s way of narrating cold war history reflects the same provincialism he foists approvingly upon his American protagonists. In part this is a matter of style—the author resorts quite often to down-home cliché: Eastern Europe in 1956 was a “powder keg,” Communism was “like a building constructed on quicksand.” At times he edges close to bathos: Richard Nixon was defeated by “an adversary more powerful than either the Soviet Union or the international communist movement. It was the Constitution of the United States of America.” But this folksy prose—while maladapted to the broad-brush historical overviews Gaddis occasionally attempts (“Karl Marx knew little about penguins, but he did acknowledge, in the sexist terminology of 1852, that ‘Men make their own history’”)—is also a function of his terms of reference. John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of America’s cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers.

  As a result, this is a book whose silences are especially suggestive. The “third world” in particular comes up short. How we look at international history is always in some measure a function of where we stand. But it takes a uniquely parochial perspective—and one ill-becoming someone described by Michael Beschloss in the New York Times Book Review as “a scholar of extraordinary gifts” offering “his long-awaited retrospective verdict on the co
ld war”—to publish a history of the cold war containing not even an index entry for Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, Grenada, or El Salvador, not to speak of Mozambique, the Congo, or Indonesia. Major events in Iran—where the CIA’s 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq is still held against the U.S.—and Guatemala (where the U.S. toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán on June 27, 1954, precipitating decades of armed and bloody conflict) each receive passing acknowledgment from Gaddis, summarized thus: “The consequences, in both regions, proved costly.”

  Indeed so. But those costs are never analyzed, much less incorporated into the author’s evaluation of the cold war as a whole. For Gaddis, as for so many American politicians and statesmen, the “third world” was a sideshow, albeit one in which hundreds of thousands of the performers got killed.4 And he seems to believe that whatever unfortunate developments took place in the course of these peripheral scuffles, they were confined to the cold war’s early years. Later, things improved: “The 1970s were not the 1950s.” Well, yes they were—in El Salvador, for example, not to mention Chile. But this sort of tunnel vision, tipping most of the world offstage and focusing exclusively upon Great Power confrontations in Europe or East Asia, is the price Gaddis pays for placing himself firmly in Washington, D.C., when “thinking” the cold war. For the other superpower saw the cold war very differently.